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Will Cloud Providers Survive?

Posted 5/16/2014By Ben Taylor

In response to our earlier editorial on public clouds, Peter, a software engineer working for a European government, provides some perspective regarding the issues with hosting their resources on a multi-tenant cloud service. The factors for choosing a public host vs. a private hosting solution are changing. No longer are cost, performance, and scalability the primary issues.

Some time ago we only discussed about cost, technical and operational impact of on-premises vs cloud solutions.

Focus has changed to the questions "What data is stored in a specific application? Is the cloud an option for an application, and which providers fullfill our policies?".

Probably the cloud providers have more resources to protect our data, but that's no longer the main topic. The question is whether we have control over our data, whether we can easily move it back to our servers, whether we can definitely erase it in the cloud and whether other countries can force our cloud providers to give them our data.

By consequence I predict more locally managed datacenters will be created. Those datacenters will be running mainly on US hardware, software and expertise, but ownership and control will be local.

I’m sure this is not only an issue for those of us on the European continent. This must be a focus worldwide. Are governmental policies going to kill the cloud? Huge investments have been made to share hardware resources. Are they going to be able to get a return on their investment by hosting data nobody cares about?

If we can only publish on public cloud servers applications and data we are not concerned about for privacy it could greatly reduce the applicaitons hosted publicly.

I believe this may be an issue where we are not going to be able to wait and see much longer. Are we going to have to push back on government access to our privacy? Does it really matter if your data is stored publicly or privately ; can government agencies require access to the data regardless? Share your opinion online or send your thoughts by email to btaylor@sswug.org.